Top 10 Terms Project Managers Use

hello I'm Jennifer wit director of project manager.com [Music] well Welcome to our whiteboard session today on terms that project managers used today I'm going to talk about my top 10 and hopefully they'll be helpful I want to point you to a resource that I think is very helpful um this is the guide to project management body knowledge by PMI the project management Institute there are other resources out there you can certainly Google some of these terms too but it's important coming into project management whether you're new to project management coming in or maybe you're on

and off as the project manager but there are several terms that project managers use again this is not the endall Beall these are just some common terms that sometimes get twisted and misused sometimes so I want to clarify some of these so the first one is you may hear WBS when I came on board as a project manager I thought what in the world is that a WBS and some people called them the wibbit I'm like what's a wibbit or a WBS so it's actually a work breakdown structure so a work breakdown structure is it's

hierarchial and it breaks down the work and it's deliverables oriented and it really defines the scope of the project so the work breakdown structure keeps breaking different components down to show all the work again that produces deliverables and in essence is the total scope of the project number two is a milestone so you hear different Milestones you hear different points uh on the schedule so this is a significant point in time or event that's on your schedule sometimes you'll see them marked as like a black diamond and again that IND indicates a milestone on your

project sometimes uh a good best practice for project managers is once you hit a milestone on time that's a great cause for celebration I always use those to celebrate something significant ific being done number three is a baseline so this to me is where a project can become a failed project or successful project because in the beginning of the project it's important to once the plan is uh approved by the Change Control Board is to Baseline it so you're in essence approving the plan the project plan which also includes the project schedule and so what

happens is during the project of course changes are always going to occur changes to the time time the scope the budget and the quality so as long as you take those changes to a CCB which we'll talk about later to get approved then they're giving you approval to rebaseline the project and that's approval to make changes so if your schedule is elongated U maybe it's delayed for some time if you get the approp appropriate approval and rebaseline to me that again is the difference between a failed or successful project so very important the other is

a triple constraint so the little twist about a triple constraint is there four components of the triple constraint it's usually indicated by a triangle so there it's it's balancing the time the cost the scope and the quality of your project so with the triple constraint as these things occur specifically around changes so the uh time if you increase the time it might it might and will um impact at least one of these other components so it's always um managing these things so you keep your project on track and these things are the things that you

look at when you take things to the CCB your Change Control Board number five is a Project Life Cycle so there are many different types of project life cycles this is a singlephase life cycle this is the one indicated by PMI the project management Institute again it's a single phase and so they're initiating processes that are that occur that feed the planning processes and at the same time so once your project begins executing the executing processes monitoring and controlling processes begin to occur throughout the project and then once the project is completed you hit your

closing processes so that is a Project Life Cycle initiating planning monitoring and controlling executing and closing the project number six is a Gant chart so a Gant chart is a tool it's a graphical display of the schedule information so if you look at your work breakdown structure in your in your uh tool that you use you can look at your work breakdown structure it includes dates and durations for task um to be completed or deliverables to be produced and then the CCB so when I came on board as a project manager I kept hearing about

a CCP I thought what is a CCB so it stands for the Change Control Board so the Change Control Board board is a group of stakeholders so it's not all of the stakeholders it's representative from the stakeholder groups and they are on your board they're the people who um are designated in your project plan who are the people with the authority to make approval um or denials for things so they review changes they review changes they evaluate them they approve them they delay them or reject changes on your project so these are the people with

the authority what I love about this is it takes the pressure off of project managers I see um many times where project managers try to take upon themselves to make these decisions and it's not for the project manager to make it's for the project manager to have the processes in place get the change uh processes in place for the changes to be fed to the Change Control Board and really facilitate that process and again it's the it's the ccb's um responsibility for making those decisions and then the stakeholders again so who is a stakeholder so

the stakeholders include um people or organizations um it could be your customers it could be your clients it could be your vendor Partners it could be different organizations and they're actively involved so it's important that they're actively involved and they they interact and may be positive or negatively affected by the execution of the project so they have a vested interest so these people who are um deemed the stakeholders again they're engaged in something that's being done on the project is usually to assist them with something that they need and they certainly uh don't want any

negative impacts the other one is the change management so many times there is confusion on managing change and change management they s they sound similar but change management is about uh it's a project management plan so it includes the processes on who does what when and where uh related to the changes on the projects and this project management plan is to control the scope versus managing change is typically associated with managing change of a project so a project is initiated or executed and it's going to infiltrate different organizations or groups of the corporation and that

change is going to have some trigger emotional behaviors of the company so there are many organizations that focus on managing the change they come in and help uh the organizations do the communications the planning for the people so that it doesn't cause mass chaos when that project is implemented risk mitigation versus risk management so again like Risk Management is the plan so risk mitigation is important because it's different than risk identification it's important to identify risk and people on the project sometimes are really good about identifying risk specifically at the beginning of the project but

it's important to identify those all along the way but more importantly is not just identifying the risk but coming up with a mitigation strategy so the risk mitigation is about building a risk response uh it's a risk response planning technique associated with threats to the project so if these risks that are identified occur you need to know like what happens next so if you just identify them and then those threats do occur on the price project then then you're like oh no if you don't have the mitigation strategy and this occurs then it just takes

up time it can uh called a cause a filled project by taking too much time or you're not prepared maybe you need specific uh resources maybe you need specific equipment or something that is not easy to access so to have that in place to know how to do that but the idea is to reduce the probability of that risk occurring or reducing the impact if it does occur so to me these are some of the top 10 to know and know the differences between and help you in your project coming on board as a project

manager if you need a tool to help you manage these items effectively on your project so you can begin to use these terms appropriately then sign up for our software now at projectmanager.com